SkyDrive.com coding reveals possible cloud music player

The folks over at LiveSide have been going through the source code of SkyDrive.com and uncovered a tasty tidbit of musical interest: SkyDrive.com appears to be getting a cloud-based music player. Resource images obtained by LiveSide from an internal testing version of SkyDrive seem to corroborate the feature, depicting player control button icons for "play," "pause," and "skip."

The cloud player feature is not a huge surprise in and of itself, especially in light of the recent addition of album art support in SkyDrive. However, what is intriguing about it is that it could be the long-awaited Xbox Music cloud storage feature that was announced by Microsoft back in October. In the press release for Xbox Music, it said that it would offer:

Cloud Storage. Available in the coming year, a scan-and-match feature will take you beyond the 30 million tracks globally offered through Xbox Music. It will add all the music you own to your Xbox Music cloud catalog, including music acquired through other services. This means you can add almost any content you have to your personal Xbox Music collection, even if it’s not available in the Xbox Music catalog.

While there is no conclusive evidence that the two are related, it stands to reason that Microsoft would not confuse users by creating two separate cloud storage services to compete against each other. Not to mention that MS has been unifying every other aspect of their media services across the Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 and Xbox platforms. At any rate, it's a nice addition to SkyDrive and remains to be seen if it will give Amazon's and Google's cloud music services a run for their money.

I would love to have cloud music storage that streams!
I had two music files out in my SkyDrive account that I was using as test subjects. I could occasinally get them to stream to my Windows phone, but more often than not it would give me an error. I last tested the files on Saturday night. Today I see that those two music files are gone. I didn't delete them and no one has access to my SkyDrive account. Did MS remove them for me?

The current Xbox Music match feature is horribly broken, they need to fix that first. It screwed up my collection so badly I ended up turning it off, wiping the database, and re-adding everything. Even then there are a couple of albums with complete metadata info that still get listed as Unknown Album.

I have had the same thing. It turned out that my songs that were "unknown" are not available... Hopefully this will allow my device to put these unknowns on SkyDrive for me to stream even though Xbox music doesn't know them.